My first lithophane experiment

Made on a Glowforge
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I was recently gifted with a couple nice big pieces of 1/4" white acrylic (not Proofgrade but still very nice) and I decided to use it to experiment with doing a lithophane.

I chose this photo of a night-blooming cereus that I took of the one in my yard that bloomed last year:

Night%20blooming%20cereus

I used the new portrait mode on an iPhone XS to isolate the flower from the background, and it worked great!

Here’s the resulting lithophane:

final

It’s a start!

The process I used was: photo --> .stl model --> depth map --> Photoshop convert to PNG --> Glowforge.

Edit: process description is now available here --> How I made my lithophane

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That turned out very nice. I have been playing around lately with Meshlab and just as when I try to use Blender, it is somewhat daunting. I don’t know what half of the functions are referring to.

What was the final size?

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That’s gorgeous! I’ll bet it would look fantastic framed! :grinning:

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This is one case where defocusing the beam will probably yield great results.

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TIL the word lithophane, so that’s cool.

Also, this lithophane is very cool.

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How about I put together a rough step by step of what I did on this one? Look for it in BTM soon. And I’ll be glad to show you in person on your next visit.

About 2.5" x 2.5"

I almost threw it back in for an additional defocussed pass, but decided not to because I thought I might lose fine detail. I might give it another go though.

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That looks cool! Well done!

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This is SO beautiful. The original photo is stunning…and the outcome on acrylic even more so. The process fascinates me, as well.

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Hey folks–

I’ve uploaded the process description here:

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Fantastic work

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Wow, what a fabulous photo to work from! This is lovely!